Drop a PDF here
or click to choose
processed in your browser · never uploaded
Drop or click to replace
Pull the text (the text layer) out of a PDF, completely free. Drag and drop a PDF and the text from each page is extracted on the spot. Choose how to lay it out: "Keep line breaks" reconstructs lines close to the original layout, while "Flow into paragraphs" joins broken mid-sentence line breaks into readable prose — handy when you want to paste into Word or Excel, or grab the body text for quoting and searching. Type something like "1-3,5" in the Pages box to extract only the pages you need, and turn on "Mark page breaks" to insert markers like "--- 2 ---" between pages. Copy the result to your clipboard, or save it as a UTF-8 .txt file. Even when a PDF viewer won't let you select or copy text, this tool can often still pull it out as long as the PDF has a text layer. PDFs whose content is only images (such as scanned paper) have no text data, so extraction returns nothing — OCR (recognizing characters inside an image) is not supported; use a PDF that contains a real text layer instead. Loading and extraction all run in your browser with JavaScript (pdf.js); the PDF is never uploaded, stored, or sent to a server. There's nothing to install and no sign-up, so it's safe for confidential documents. If you want to turn a PDF into images, use PDF to Image; to fix mojibake (garbled text), use the Mojibake Fix tool; to change character encodings, use Encoding Convert.
How to use
- Drag and drop a PDF. You can also click to choose a file. The text from each page is extracted right away.
- Pick a layout: "Keep line breaks" or "Flow into paragraphs". Optionally type a range like 1-3,5 in the Pages box.
- Turn on "Mark page breaks" to insert markers (--- 2 ---) between pages.
- Click "Copy" for the clipboard, or "Download .txt" to save a text file. Your PDF is never sent anywhere.
FAQ
A viewer won't let me copy the text — can this still extract it?
If the PDF has a text layer, yes. Even when copying is blocked in a viewer, this tool reads the page's text data directly, so PDFs that contain a text layer can usually be extracted. PDFs whose content is only an image (a scan) have no text data and cannot be extracted — see the next question.
Can it extract text from a scanned (image) PDF?
No. This tool reads the text layer embedded in a PDF; it does not do OCR (recognizing characters inside an image). A scanned PDF is just an image with no text data, so extraction comes back empty. Use a PDF that contains real text (for example, one created on a computer).
The line breaks come out messy. Can I clean them up?
Choose "Flow into paragraphs" to join mid-sentence line breaks into readable prose. If you'd rather keep something close to the original layout, choose "Keep line breaks". Switch between them depending on whether you're pasting into Word, Excel, or somewhere else.
Can I extract only certain pages?
Yes. Type a range like "1-3,5" in the Pages box to extract just those pages; leave it blank for all pages. Turn on "Mark page breaks" to add markers showing where each page begins and ends.
Is the PDF I load uploaded to a server?
No. Loading and text extraction all run in your browser with JavaScript (pdf.js). The PDF is never uploaded, stored, or sent to a server, and there's nothing to install, so it's safe for confidential documents.